Thank you for being here as I mark four years of full-time business. Over the next four essays, I’ll be sharing four reflections from the rear view mirror that shaped the business I have today.
Let’s start at the roots: business model.
You have to earn your business model.
Back in January 2022, I had a vision for a group program called Radical Commitments:
Radical Commitments is a new, group community approach to support you in tending to yourself and your commitments over the next year to sustainably run your business/team. Come together in community each season and month to reflect, recenter, and recommit to your path forward and your next steps.
It would have included:
- 12 monthly 90-minute planning sessions
- 3 seasonal co-working and strategy retreats
- A private online community and WhatsApp/Voxer thread
- A full video library and business teachings
- A discounted invite to a year-end retreat
- And 12 lessons in feminist business practice
All for $250 per month, capped at 15 people.
But I didn’t launch it.
I floated the idea to a few folks and pulled back. At the time, I had fewer than 120 people on my email list. I wasn’t confident I could fill the seats, and the messaging wasn't quite right.
It was hard to shelve it, because I knew in my bones how powerful it could be.
Looking back, you might say, “Jessica, isn’t this basically the Deeper Business Membership… plus the Cohort’s personal support and calls?”
Exactly.
That idea—Radical Commitments—was the seed of everything that would later become my full Deeper Foundations ecosystem.
But in early 2022? I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have what I needed to make it work.
Because the truth is, most of us don’t start with the business model we want. Especially those of us who want group programs, courses, and leveraged delivery.
We have to earn it.
Here’s what I needed to earn first.
A lot of people want to build group or leveraged business models. I was one of them! I knew that I loved teaching, loved bringing people together, and wanted to make more money with less 1:1 time.
But I didn’t have what I needed to make that business model successful.
Audience Size: Math needs to Math
You’ve probably heard that 2-3% of your list might be ready to buy any given offer. For a list of 200, that’s about 5-6 buyers. That’s exactly how many people joined my very first group at the end of 2022.
So what did I do? I focused on growing my audience—slowly, consistently. I wrote. I taught. I shared. Week after week.
Which meant I spent the next three years building my audience week in and week out. You can read a post detailing how I got to my first 1000 subscribers.
Point of View: Making Ops and Systems Sexy (and Sustainable)
“Planning and Prioritization? Metrics tracking? Time management? Structures for better networking? Blech. You can’t sell operations.”
I got told this by every mentor I had in the first few years.
But I knew those topics mattered. These are fundamental concepts that I know drive a business, and people told me it wouldn’t sell because it wasn’t sexy and hype driven. So I taught them anyway—for free.
For two years, I hosted the monthly Deeper Business Dialogues and sharpened my ideas. I kept writing. I kept testing. I kept refining.
Eventually, I stopped parroting basic productivity and business advice and my own synthesis emerged. I had crafted my own point of view, my own approaches about what worked, and how to make sustainable business building both accessible and appealing.
This became the genesis of my favorite frameworks of Roots to Fruits Metrics, Ecosystem Building, and Three Sisters Pricing—concepts that resonate not because they’re hyped, but because they illustrate the deeper principles from a shared point of view.
Primed and Proven Track Record
In my first years, I worked primarily 1:1, with both individuals and small organizations. It wasn’t always the business model I wanted, but it was the one that allowed me to test, refine, and prove the concepts I now teach more broadly.
Every tool I created, every framework I built, every rhythm I developed went through the trials of real-world application. That’s the invisible work no one sees when they join a program later. The hours spent refining a tool with one client, then testing it again with another, slowly shaping it into something repeatable and resilient.
But more than that, I was building something else: trust.
Each of those early clients became part of the deeper web of my business. They came back. They referred others. They started reading more, attending free workshops, sharing my writing and videos. And over time, I had a growing circle of people who already believed in my work—people who weren’t just aware of what I offered, but primed to go deeper when the time was right.
That’s why I no longer have to push cold. I have an ecosystem: returning clients, readers who’ve been learning alongside me for years, audience members who’ve already seen the depth in a free class or blog post.
So when I launched the Deeper Business Membership, and later rounds of the Cohort, I wasn’t asking strangers to trust me. I was offering a next step to people who already knew what I was about and had seen the work in action.
That’s what I mean when I say you need a primed and proven track record.
You don’t need flashy Stripe screenshots.
You need results.
And you need the relationships that carry those results forward.
The business model you eventually want might not be the one you start with.
We don’t live in a world anymore where you can simply build it and they will come, especially not when you’re just starting out.
The early years aren’t just about launching offers. They’re about gathering the raw materials: your point of view, your people, your process. They’re where you test, refine, and earn the trust that makes leveraged models work.
And while you’re building that? You need at least one offer or bridge job that keeps you financially supported while you do the deeper work. (Watch how I really made my first $100K here).
It might take longer than you hoped.
It might look different than you imagined.
So if you’re dreaming of courses, groups, memberships, licensing—good. Keep that vision. But don’t skip the season you’re in.
Lay the foundations now. Earn it in real time.
That future business model?
It’ll be stronger, deeper, and far more sustainable because it’ll be built on solid roots.
Next week, we’ll look at what I wish I had known about creating my “signature offer” when I started.